The Pursuit of Harpyness » Anti-Semitismhttp://www.harpyness.com
As narrated by the most charming and vicious women on the internetSat, 29 Sep 2012 11:37:30 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.9When Debating Circumcision Isn’t About Circumcisionhttp://www.harpyness.com/2011/06/07/when-debating-circumcision-isnt-about-debating-circumcision/
http://www.harpyness.com/2011/06/07/when-debating-circumcision-isnt-about-debating-circumcision/#commentsTue, 07 Jun 2011 13:09:52 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=20135Circumcision is in the news now that San Francisco, California will vote on a referendum in November to criminalize the practice, even though it’s a religious requirement for Muslims and Jews, and common in the general population. Foreskin-free has been the norm in the US since the mid-20th century, although there’s a vocal minority in the US who regard it as cruel and sadistic. The medical establishment largely agrees that while medicallly unnecessary, circumcision is not abuse, does not cause harm and may even convey some health benefits. Neither government nor law enforcement has ever tried to interfere with what’s ultimately a decision made by parents for religious or medical reasons.

The real problem here is the way some Californians think they can put their fellow citizens’ religious (and/or medical and parenting) decisions to a vote. But I confess, thus far I haven’t waded into the debate because it’s moot; if the ban passes, a court will strike it down for violating the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

Here’s where I got angry: when the debate slid into ugly ethnic hatred. Even though circumcision is far from an exclusively Jewish practice, the anti-Semites showed up to the party. Somehow opposition to circumcision took a wrong turn and landed in Nazi Germany:

Look! It’s a big, blonde, muscular hero taking on that ugly, malevolent, bearded Jew! Where have I seen that before?:

From an anti-Semitic German children's book.

Oh, right. We’re glad we have that Aryan hero because everyone knows that sneaky, evil Jews pose a threat to innocent children:

From another children's book--the perverted Jew is giving poison to little Aryan children.

The “Foreskin Man” cartoons are the creation of Matthew Hess, president of a San Diego group, MGM Bill,* which is gathering signatures to put a similar anti-circumcision measure on the ballot in Santa Monica. Hess denies that he’s an anti-Semite, saying ”…we’re not trying to be anti-Semitic,” he replied. “We’re trying to be pro-human rights.” Human rights are surely the reason he created this grotesque caricature of a mohel***:

which bears more than a passing resemblance to this:

A poster for the famous anti-Semitic "documentary" commissioned by Joseph Goebbels.

Hess’s mohel page also claims that the rabbi enjoys drinking the child’s blood—the “delicious metzitzah b’peh” he refers to is the ancient practice of using suction to stem the bleeding. It’s no longer done in mainstream Jewish circumcision rituals, and is never used in Muslim or secular ones. But no good Jew-hater ever passes up an opportunity to make use of the medieval blood libel about Jews drinking babies’ blood, so thanks, Matthew Hess, for keeping it real.

Hess’s claims not to be an anti-Semite fall even flatter when you look at his cartoons—none of which have similar caricatures of Muslims, or pediatricians or anyone else who performs circumcisions. No, the disgust and violence and hatred is reserved for Jews and the glory for the Aryan-looking heroes who save babies from them. There are legitimate objections to circumcision, but not by Hess and his group. They’re pushing straight up propaganda of the most time-honored and despicable kind, and it has nothing to do with circumcision at all.

*It’s also practiced by indigenous tribes in Africa, Australia and the South Pacific, although usually as a coming-of-age ritual for adolescents.

** MGM stands for “Male Genital Mutilation” as though male circumcision was the equivalent of FGM, a sure sign we’re dealing with some men’s rights bullshit.

*** In Judaism, the mohel (rhymes with “oil”) is a special practitioner trained to perform the medical and religious duties of circumcision.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2011/06/07/when-debating-circumcision-isnt-about-debating-circumcision/feed/49(Former) Feminist Icon Helen Thomas is a Raving Anti-Semitehttp://www.harpyness.com/2011/03/18/former-feminist-icon-helen-thomas-is-a-raving-anti-semite/
http://www.harpyness.com/2011/03/18/former-feminist-icon-helen-thomas-is-a-raving-anti-semite/#commentsFri, 18 Mar 2011 23:59:39 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=19419Y’all may remember when I wrote about Helen Thomas last year after she made statements about how Jews in Israel should “Go back to Poland. Go back to Germany.” Many people called her out as an anti-Semite, including myself. But in a recent interview in Playboy, the 90-year old journalist proves that those brief comments were, in fact, the tip of an iceberg of genuine tinfoil-hat-wearing-crazy ethnic hateration.

In the interview, Thomas says that Jews are “wonderful people” and that she’s “anti-Zionist, not anti-Jewish.” She criticizes the Israeli government’s policies, which is not necessarily anti-Semitic (I actually even agree with some of what she says in that regard). But then Thomas undermines every legitimate point she might have made about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a veritable festival of old-school paranoid anti-Semitism.

Here’s a taste:

PLAYBOY: Let’s get to something else you said more recently. In a speech in Detroit last December, you told an Arab group, “We are owned by the propagandists against the Arabs. There’s no question about that. Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists. No question, in my opinion. They put their money where their mouth is. We’re being pushed into a wrong direction in every way.” Do you stand by that statement?

THOMAS: Yes, I do. I know it was horrendous, but I know it’s true. Tell me it’s not true and I’ll be happy to be contradicted. I’m just saying they’re using their power, and they have power in every direction.

PLAYBOY: That stereotype of Jewish control has been around for more than a century. Do you actually think there’s a secret Jewish conspiracy at work in this country?

THOMAS: Not a secret. It’s very open. What do you mean secret?

PLAYBOY: Well, for instance, explain the connection between Hollywood and what’s happening with the Palestinians.

THOMAS: Power over the White House, power over Congress.

PLAYBOY: By way of contributions?

THOMAS: Everybody is in the pocket of the Israeli lobbies, which are funded by wealthy supporters, including those from Hollywood. Same thing with the financial markets. There’s total control.

PLAYBOY: In America you’re talking about a relatively small community. Jews make up roughly two percent of the U.S. population. On a worldwide level, the percentage is well under one percent. Those numbers don’t exactly spell domination.

THOMAS: I get where you’re leading with this. You know damn well the power they have. It isn’t the two percent. It’s real power when you own the White House, when you own these other places in terms of your political persuasion. Of course they have power. You don’t deny that. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?

PLAYBOY: Yes.

THOMAS: That’s what I thought. Well, you know damn well they have power.

The idea that Jews are a malevolent band of conspirators who secretly rule the world is propaganda that has been used for over 1,000 years as an excuse to disenfranchise, exile, and kill us, especially in Europe. The Holocaust, after all, was predicated on Hitler’s belief that rich Jews were deliberately destroying the German economy, even though German Jews were the most patriotic and assimilated in Europe; his propaganda was successful because it was merely fanning the flames of ethnic hatred that had been present in Europe for centuries. That kind of paranoid conspiracy theory has always been the excuse the non-Jewish majority uses to validate their attacks on the Jewish minority—and it’s been around for centuries before the state of Israel was even thought of, so it’s clearly not based in objections to Israeli policy. When Helen Thomas was a girl, my great-grandfather fled pogroms in Europe caused specifically by the type of anti-Semitic paranoia that she still believes today.

That’s why, despite the fact that she’s had a brilliant, barrier-breaking career and done a great deal for women in journalism, I feel absolutely no sympathy for Helen Thomas when I read this:

THOMAS: I’m a reporter. [sobs] I know damn well what they’re going to say because they have their print, they have their ink. They don’t give a damn about the truth. They have to have it their way, and they’ll be writing my obituary.

“They”, of course, means Jews. In her paranoia, Helen Thomas thinks that we’re out to get her, and since we control the media, we’ll make sure her anti-Semitism is mentioned in the lede of her obituary. And you know what? I have no problem with that. It’s a shame when bigotry undermines someone’s stellar achievements. It’s a shame to die with people’s last impressions being that you’re a raving bigot. Unfortunately, that’s the price you pay for being a raving bigot, regardless of who runs the media.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2011/03/18/former-feminist-icon-helen-thomas-is-a-raving-anti-semite/feed/18Sarah Palin and “Blood Libel”http://www.harpyness.com/2011/01/12/sarah-palin-and-blood-libel/
http://www.harpyness.com/2011/01/12/sarah-palin-and-blood-libel/#commentsWed, 12 Jan 2011 15:31:39 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=18438Not much that Sarah Palin does can shock me these days, so I wasn’t particularly surprised when she backtracked from her “crosshairs” poster and had her aides claim the crosshairs were just “surveyor marks.” Sarah Palin is a uniquely weak character—she can dish it, but she can’t take it, just like she can run for Vice President, but can’t hack four years as governor of a state with fewer people than my neighborhood.

My expectations were already low when she posted a gauzily-lit, platitude-filled response to the criticism on her Facebook page.

My jaw dropped at about the halfway mark, when Palin says: “Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”

Blood libel, for those of you who did not grow up with anti-Semitism, is the the anti-Jewish propaganda that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, and therefore Christians must protect themselves from the Jewish threat. It was used for centuries as an excuse for pogroms and genocide and is still frequently invoked by the anti-Zionist Muslim media and Holocaust deniers like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hutton Gibson. In the US, blood libel is included in the dogma of neo-Nazi groups like the Aryan Nation and White Aryan Resistance. To anyone who espouses anti-Semitic ideology, it’s a familiar term—a dog-whistle, of sorts—especially as it’s used here to describe the media, which anti-Semites believe is Jewish-controlled. The fact that Gabrielle Giffords is Jewish makes it even more outrageous. (Read more discussion here on Politico)

That was a carefully crafted statement. Like most politicians, Sarah Palin probably did not write it herself. But “blood libel” is not a term that’s used in casual conversation–it has a very specific, very ugly meaning. The term was used for a reason. I want Sarah Palin to explain just what that reason was.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2011/01/12/sarah-palin-and-blood-libel/feed/31Et Tu, Helen Thomas?http://www.harpyness.com/2010/06/08/et-tu-helen-thomas/
http://www.harpyness.com/2010/06/08/et-tu-helen-thomas/#commentsTue, 08 Jun 2010 11:11:44 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=15788I’ve always been a huge admirer of Helen Thomas, both of her barrier-breaking career and her dogged determination to ask hard questions and speak truth to power. She was even dubbed an Honorary Harpy on this site.

So I was extremely disturbed and pained when video went viral of Thomas making anti-Semitic remarks on camera during an impromptu interview outside the White House after the Jewish Heritage celebration last month. Thomas was fired from her job at Hearst News Services and dropped by her speaker’s bureau. Video here.

In recent days a video surfaced of Thomas saying, outside the White House on May 27, that “the Jews should get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland “and America and everywhere else,” adding that the land belonged to the Palestinians. Uh-oh.

Now I know a lot of you are going to say well, she only said what’s factually true about the land, but she didn’t only say that. It’s that Germany and Poland business. Without that, these remarks wouldn’t have been nearly as controversial as they are. And those were really terrible things to say (while kind of laughing, as if it were a joke; check out the video).

…it was her reference to Germany and Poland that did for her. It was, quite simply, a disgraceful, thoughtless and indefensible statement. She went way over the top.

I do not believe that all criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic, nor is support for the Palestinian people.

But telling anyone to “go home” or “go back where you came from” has always been shorthand for ethnic hatred, no matter which group is on the receiving end. The references to “it’s not Germany, it’s not Poland” and “go back to Germany and Poland” are incredibly, deliberately offensive given the fate of German and Polish Jews. They’re also a dead giveaway for Thomas’s bias and ignorance—similar to racist Americans who call all Latinos “Mexican” and all Asians “Chinese”—since only a fraction of Israelis are descended from pre-war communities in Poland and Germany.

What’s also alarming is that if you read about Thomas’s ouster on various news sites, you’ll see many, many people in the comments section lauding Helen Thomas for “telling the truth” and using this incident as an excuse to air the worst kind of anti-Semitic hatred. I won’t link to them because they make my blood boil but suffice it to say you’ll see the usual hateful canards about “Jew-controlled media”, “Jews are too powerful”, “Jews are enemies of freedom,” etc.

Paul Jay posted a rambly, poorly reasoned HuffPo apologia about how Helen Thomas wasn’t being anti-Semitic and we should all just give her a break, especially given her age. Greenslade’s Guardian piece—while admitting the offensiveness of Thomas’s words—still casts her as a victim: it’s titled “Why is Helen Thomas Being Gagged?”, as though this was a case of media censorship. He completely ignores the fact that she wasn’t gagged—she was fired. That’s not a violation of free speech—as Greenslade seems to believe—it’s the natural consequence of saying stupid, offensive shit that discredits you and embarrasses your employer and colleagues.

As for Thomas herself, Sarah.of.a.lesser.god and I both thought that the video made her appear a few noodles short of a kugel. Perhaps her age was a factor—it’s hard to say for sure.

Regardless, Helen Thomas is an expert on the media, politics and what it means to speak on camera. She not only should have known better—she did know better. She said it anyway. Even those inclined to blame encroaching senility should remember that senility—like intoxication—only reveals what was already there all along.